India’s water governance regime is crying for reforms

The International Water Day serves as an annual reminder of the mess in management of water resources

In an intriguing order on 20 March, the Uttarakhand High Court has recognized the rivers Ganges and Yamuna as a living entity, which means that anybody found polluting the river would be seen as harming a human being. It remains to be seen what impact the order has but the order does reflect a sense of urgency in trying to rescue one of India’s most important rivers from rampant pollution.

India’s water woes however do not end with the pathetic state of the Ganges. After two consecutive rainfall deficient years, 2016 saw normal monsoons in India. However, a look at reservoir levels shows that even a normal rainfall year is failing to sufficiently recharge our water bodies. Nowhere in the country are reservoir levels significantly more than half of their total capacity.

What is even more worrying is the long-term trend: there seems to have been a secular decline in reservoir levels. Data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy shows that last 10 years’ average live storage as percentage of live capacity at full reservoir level has fluctuated between 25-33% in this decade. Between 2001-02 and 2004-05 this value was always more than 60%. This seems to be a result of increasing exploitation of ground water. The rate of withdrawal of groundwater as a percentage of net groundwater available per year—defined as level of ground water development—has seen a sharp increase between 2004 and 2011. While states such as Gujarat and Tamil Nadu registered some improvement, traditional farming states such as Punjab and Haryana have witnessed rising exploitation of groundwater resources.

The proportion of farmers dependent on ground-water irrigation has risen sharply over the past couple of decades, and lax regulation on water use, lopsided price incentives, and high energy subsidies to farmers have encouraged relentless exploitation of groundwater through borewells in order to water farmlands. As a two-part data journalism series published in Mint last year showed, the inefficient use of water in agriculture is the main source of inefficiency in India’s water governance regime. India’s farms consume more water to grow same amount of crops compared to global averages. What makes this even worse is the fact that despite being a water-scarce country, our agricultural exports are extremely water intensive .

While the farm sector is an obvious candidate for urgent water reforms, non-farm use of water also suffers from unplanned usage and waste. A majority of India’s households are dependent on ground water for their day to day water requirements. According to the 2011 census, less than half the households with access to water supply in their premises depend on treated tap-water. This means that a majority of India’s households are using private means (such as bore-wells) to extract groundwater without any regulation or concern for conservation. Unplanned urbanisation will only accentuate this problem. The fast depletion of ground-water resources will also increase the risks of contamination, as several experts have warned.

It is not these concerns have not been taken note of. A 2015 report of the Standing Committee on Water Resources noted the rapid depletion of groundwater resources in the key granaries of the country and the lack of up-to-date and comprehensive data on India’s water resources which is hindering effective water management.

In July 2016, a committee under the chairpersonship of Mihir Shah, an economist and a former Planning Commission member, submitted a report on restructuring the Central Water Commission and Central Ground Water Board which criticized India’s water governance framework for a complete lack of coordination and clarity. It argued that official estimates suggesting adequacy of water resources in India seem dodgy when compared with independent studies which are based on internationally comparable evapotranspiration rates (sum of water lost to atmosphere due to evaporation and transpiration via plants). The report also criticized India’s existing water-governance system as silo-based which views ground water, river basin rejuvenation and other such challenges as isolated tasks. Even these tasks are being ill-managed thanks to a human resource crunch in key bodies such as the Central Ground Water Board, the report pointed out.

The sorry state of water governance in India is a result of both state and market failure. Every rice farmer in Punjab, who is over-exploiting ground water to grow rice (with guaranteed procurement by the Food Corporation of India) is undermining a public good to maximise his private gain as he does not have to pay the cost for doing so (the society at large bears the cost). The state failure lies not just in instituting the wrong incentives but also in mismanagement of water systems. The Shah Committee report has highlighted how the huge amount of water collected in government reservoirs is not available to farmers for use in various parts of the country. Unless the mismanagement of water resources is addressed and disincentives put in place to prevent over-exploitation of water, India is likely to witness rising water-related crises and conflicts in the years to come.